More than just code review
Simon Willison’s Weblog
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22nd August 2026
The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way.
Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have written, but there are other ways to achieve that goal. Eyeballing every line of code has never been the most effective way to validate a chance to a piece of software.
Recent articles
Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code - 19th August 2026
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026
Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face - 7th August 2026
This is a note by Simon Willison, posted on 22nd August 2026.
code-review 15
ai 2,198
generative-ai 1,947
llms 1,914
coding-agents 240
agentic-engineering 59
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